Takeoff

Knuckleduster lets himself into Koichi's home uninvited and lays out what he is hunting. The substance is called Trigger, and it swells a user's Quirk while eating away at their judgment, which means any ordinary citizen who takes it can become a villain. Koichi, who has no interest in the apprenticeship the old man keeps implying, argues the police and Pro Heroes should own this problem. Knuckleduster's counter is that both are perpetually a step behind, since Trigger users are impossible to pick out of a crowd. His own method is cruder: corner thugs, make them show their tongues, because Trigger stains them an ugly black. Beat the answer out of them, find the dealer, choke off the supply.

Elsewhere, a salesman is pushing his splendid medicine on three thugs. Two of them, Rapt Tokage and Moyuru Tochi, dose themselves and feel their Quirks surge, after which the salesman leans on Soga Kugisaki to follow suit.

Koichi assumes the tongue routine is a joke until Knuckleduster starts squaring up to strangers, and he defuses it by simply asking the men to stick their tongues out. They are clean. Pop☆Step turns up and hears the plan, then offers a better one: search online for sudden villain sightings and use the pattern to find where the junkies actually are.

Knuckleduster instead fixates on a passing salesman, and Koichi knocks the man's case open, spilling hero figures. The claim of working for a toy company convinces nobody, and the old man readies an interrogation. A length of cloth catches his arm first. It belongs to Shota Aizawa, who has him pegged as a villain, and the two go at each other while Koichi and Pop☆Step watch in horror. Aizawa's kick barely registers, so he activates Erasure on the assumption that a stamina Quirk is keeping the man standing.

Koichi offers the salesman an apology and asks the man to vouch for him and Pop☆Step, but he hurries off instead. Pop☆Step recognizes him from photographs of villain incidents and sends Koichi after him. Meanwhile Knuckleduster keeps trading blows evenly and loses no strength at all under Erasure, which finally tells Aizawa the truth: the old man is not powered, he is Quirkless. He calls the fight off, apologizes, and files a report anyway, unable to charge a man who has committed no provable crime.

Koichi's chase is cut short by Soga, Rapt, and Moyuru, with Soga dosing himself for revenge. Screaming reaches Aizawa mid-report as Koichi uses Slide and Glide to stay ahead of them. He dodges Soga but runs into Moyuru, and Knuckleduster settles that with a brick to the head while Aizawa's capturing weapon pins Soga.

Pop☆Step, still trailing the salesman, is kicked out of the air by Rapt and lands on the man, spilling his case again. Reaching for the All Might figure, he twists its head free, injects what was hidden inside, and swells into a four-armed colossus. He snatches Pop☆Step and Rapt and swings them around; Knuckleduster's leg drop to the face earns him a swat into the pavement, but it loosens the grip, and Pop☆Step falls.

With no footholds to catch, she has no way to stop. Koichi rides a wall upward and launches himself at her, driven by the fact that even if heroism is out of reach for him, he still wants the sky she lives in. She does not let him catch her; she uses him as a launch pad for Leap and lands safe. Koichi, now falling himself, slams into the giant's incoming palm, redirects his own trajectory with his Quirk, and drops into a garbage pile unhurt, only for another punch to come at him. The giant shrinks mid-swing instead, Erasure having killed his Gigantification, and Aizawa wraps him up as the police arrive for all four.

Aizawa thanks Knuckleduster while calling his behavior dangerous. The old man shrugs it off as ordinary cooperation from a virtuous citizen and argues heroes need someone unbound by rules to stop incidents like this recurring. Aizawa finds the idea of crimes of conscience absurd and the man himself troublesome, a label Knuckleduster happily accepts.

In a back alley afterward, Pop☆Step is relieved Koichi survived and irritated enough by his self-deprecation that she withholds the thanks she meant to give, blushing as she turns away. Knuckleduster approves of how Koichi has learned to land. Koichi insists he never wanted a master and only said the word in the moment, which is precisely the old man's point: what slips out unplanned is what Koichi actually feels, and he still wants to be a hero. Knuckleduster tells him to chase it. From that empty alley, Koichi's life as a vigilante begins.

Trigger is explained as a drug that amplifies a Quirk while destroying the user's reasoning, making Instant Villains out of ordinary people.

Knuckleduster fights Shota Aizawa to a standstill, and Aizawa deduces from Erasure having no effect that the old man is Quirkless, filing a report on him regardless.

Mario Kugutsu, the Trigger salesman, doses himself using an All Might figure and becomes a four-armed giant before Aizawa erases his Gigantification.

Koichi throws himself off a building to save Pop☆Step, and Knuckleduster reads the act as proof he still wants to be a hero, marking the start of his vigilante life.

The second chapter of My Hero Academia: Vigilantes, written by Hideyuki Furuhashi and drawn by Betten Court. It ran forty-five pages in the September 2016 issue, dated September 20, 2016, and was collected in volume 1 as part of the Vigilantes Beginnings arc.

Nice Guy, Pop☆Step, and Knuckleduster share the cover as the trio the chapter assembles. The anime split the material across two episodes, with pages 1 to 10 in Episode 1 and pages 11 to 45 in Episode 2.

Sansa Tamakawa and Naomasa Tsukauchi appear among the responding police, and the brawl between the old man and the Erasing Hero is catalogued under the title Iwao Oguro vs. Shota Aizawa.